Tag: Barack Obama

Politics as usual

I doubt that anything illegal happened here, but there certainly is an appearance of impropriety and the scent of the backroom now threatens to overwhelm the fresh air Barack Obama promised.

Presidential administrations have always played these kinds of games, looking to protect the people they consider friends, targeting those they consdider political enemies or potentially problematic. Lyndon Johnson was a notorious horse-trader and Karl Rove’s fingerprints were all over nearly everything done to help Republicans during his boss’ eight years in the White House.

So the Congressional approbrium is a bit, well, hypocritical.

That, however, does not mean the president and his chief of staff should not be called on the carpet for what is being alleged. It is seamy and old-school and completely at odds with the campaign promises Obama made — remember chage?

Someone needs to apologize, at the very least, and it would not bother me if Rahm Emanuel were sent packing (his appointment was the first obvious indication that change and politics as usual were not all that different).

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Too little? I hope it’s not too late

The gulf Coast oil spill is not President Barack Obama’s Katrina, but it has been damaging nonetheless, so damaging, in fact, that the mea culpa he offered this afternoon just doesn’t seem enough.

The president said he was the man responsible and that mistakes have been made. The biggest one, he acknowledges, was not moving

more aggressively to clean up what he called a cozy and corrupt relationship between regulators and industry, suggesting that the disaster might have been prevented if steps were taken sooner.

“Obviously they weren’t happening fast enough,” he said. “If they were happening fast enough, this might have been caught.”

No shit. That’s what critics from the left — like David Sirota and others — have been saying for a while. While the president and his administration have been involved and focused from the beginning — in a way that George Bush never was when Katrina hit — he has done what too many in Washington (and the state capitals do): He’s let industry clean up the mess, which is like asking an 8-year-old to clean his room. It’ll get done, but no one is ever sure when.

The problem from the beginning — which the president should have known — is that industry just doesn’t care what kind of messes it creates as long as it can generate profit. It takes aggressive action on the part of the people, through their government, to keep these greedheads honest and keep us safe and healthy.

Obama has tweaked around the edges when it comes to this — on Wall Street reform, on the cleanup, on just about everything — rather than strip our corporate overlords of their power. And progressives have let him get away with it.

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Angry sycophants strike back

We knew this was coming, though I’m surprised it took so long. The Obama sycophants have started targeting progressives who are not afraid to criticize a Democrat.

I was alerted to this by a wall posting from Mark Doty on his Facebook page, but it is the kind of thing that David Sirota has been writing about and is reminiscent of Clinton’s progressive defenders during the 1990s.

Jeff McMahon, an environmental reporter writing on Truth/Slant, attacked the poet Mark Doty for slipping into a lefty version of no-nothingism. Doty, he says, ignores the facts about the Obama administration’s response to the Gulf oil spill (McMahon, apparently, is ignoring his own set of facts, which include failures by the Obama administration in the permitting process for Gulf drilling).

Populist anger inspired and perpetuated by ignorance of the facts, remaining undeterred by the facts: it’s not terribly different from those who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and who continue to believe it even when shown his birth certificate. The certificate is probably a forgery, they insist.

But is Doty the lefty equivalent of a birther? Is he walking away from Obama because of a misreading of the facts? Or, as I would argue (and I think Mark would concur), is the Gulf spill just the final cut of a thousand cuts, another sell-out from an administration that is far less progressive than many may have expected.

McMahon acknowledges that the left has to apply pressure, but he undercuts his own argument by raising the specter of a return of the Bush crowd to office:

It’s not a bad idea to put pressure on the government. It will probably be met with more attention to the Gulf and more vigor from the White House, if only in the form of better management of information. But it goes too far to categorically withdraw support for Obama based on BP’s disaster.

What no progressive seems to consider is that a weakened Obama probably will not be replaced by Ralph Nader or Jerry Brown. Only two years ago, we had a White House full of oil company executives, who are far more likely to return to power than the “Uncompromising Man” or “Governor Moonbeam.”

If Bush’s men do surf back into power, it will be on a wave of populist anger.

This argument — as David Sirota makes clear this week — has the effect of stripping the left of what little power it might have, making it appear to be little more than an adjunct of the Democratic Party.

I’ve written before about Obama’s abandonment of the very people who got him elected, about how his commitment to bipartisan consensus — which I believe stands in for ideology and leaves him without a governing philosophy — has allowed him to cut loose gays and lesbians (16 months into his term and all the LGBT community has to show for a friend in the White House is a minor executive order and a promise on DADT), civil libertarians (read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent dissections of Obama’s Bushian turns in this area) and economic populists (a smaller-than-necessary stimulus, corporate health-care plan, and so on).

The appointment of Ken Salazar — one of oil’s best friends in the Senate — to the Interior post, which is part of the story of what is happening in the Gulf as I write this, is very much a part of this lackluster record.

Democratic sycophants who are unwilling to acknowledge this are not doing anyone any favors, least of all the president they claim to support.

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About that progressive agenda

I tweeted briefly on this column yesterday, but I wanted to offer a little more by way of explanation. David Leonhardt, who is among the best business reporters/columnists working today, overstates President Obama’s progressive bonafides in his column.

He portrays an aggressive remaking of Washington, but the reality is that the remaking has not been progressive and in many ways — too many ways — has been an extension of the corporate domination and expansion of executive power we have witnessed from previous White Houses.

Yes, we have financial rules and a new healthcare arrangement, but he did not do anything to lessen corporate influence and, in fact, appears to have amplified it.

Leonhardt acknowledges this in a single paragraph — which is incredibly telling:

(T)here are also ways that Mr. Obama and today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

To translate, the president is attempting to increase access to private, for-profit health insurance and change schools via the markets — with some nominal regulation to keep everyone honest. It is an agenda that not only leaves the corporate order in place, but very well could expand it.

That’s not exactly what I’d call a progressive agenda.

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